When Dorothy got home to Kansas it always seemed to me she'd been sold a pup; Oz was far more exciting than the hardscrabble toil of her family homestead. Life for settlers in the "oblong states" of the West was tough, mean and short. Reading Willa Cather, I'd assumed she knew about frontier life on the Great Plains because, although her family was originally Welsh, she'd been born on a farm in Virginia in 1873. But the Cathers were an upwardly mobile family; Willa's father had switched from farming to real estate and insurance, and Willa went to the University of Nebraska. After she began to get articles published she switched her major and became a writer.

I arrived in Detroit ready to roll, ready to rock. At last I was in Henry Ford's Motor City, where he conceived the Model T, the vehicle that made modern America. Finally, I was in the place where Motown was born, where Berry Gordy built a musical dynasty: Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson, the Jackson 5. For me, Detroit was iconic, a symbol of America in its mid-20th-century pomp.

Does Britain need more immigrants? After months of political grandstanding on the need to let fewer people into the country, The Office for Budget Responsibility has marched debate in the opposite direction - saying Britain needs 6 million more to avoid falling into even greater debt.